KATHMANDU – Drunken Boat, America’s oldest online magazine is going to publish its 24th issue with a special focus on Nepal and Himalayan Arts. The poems are edited and translated by world renowned Himalayan poet Yuyutsu R.D. Sharma. The issue will include 35 poets and select artists from Nepal.

I must confess that I read these books out of order, or at least not in the order that I recommend for other readers. Both of these books were released in the last year and one is actually quite long for a book of poems, at 173 pages. This is an enormous output for a contemporary poet, a cursory polling of my bookshelf reveals most of my poetry collections to be in the 70-page range, and some poets can spend up to a decade polishing a collection. I see these two books by Yuyutsu Sharma, A Blizzard in my Bones and Quaking Cantos, as a depiction of a journey more akin to sagas in lengthier tomes such as Dante’s descent into the Infernoor Milton’s description of a Paradise Lost than as typical volumes of modern lyric verse. Strangely, it is the poet’s journey to a foreign land that initiates inner searching and the poet’s return home that prompts outer travels to seek healing with brethren.

My recommendation for readers is to begin with A Blizzard in my Bones. It is the longer of the pair, but it is a good entry point as I believe this to be the beginning of the journey. In the initial cycle of the book, “Asleep Like…”, a black shape pours forth from the narrator’s grandmother “its flame/burning the walls/of her throat.” It is the search for this black shape that prompts the narrator’s journey to New York City. Soon he is entering “a Babylon/of wandering winter spirits/and wavering speeches” in which he experiences “the Subway’s odor/tingling the lonely/walks to Washington Square.”

While there are many discoveries inside New York City that take place in the book, the narrator’s self-discoveries are the most compelling. He once again sees the black shape, this time “a black bird like Anne Sexton” in “Luna, Fish on Long Island Sound”, a poem about discovering oneself in love. In “The Aging Translator of Mallarme” he explores how others see him. Through the Ginsbergian howl “The Scream, Subway Avatars” the poet begins to find himself in the city, particularly in the grimy dark. A process completed in “Your Name” as the narrator describes a tongue that “licks sadness/out of my life’s numbered streets” thus melding himself with the cityscape. The book does not end with this immersion though, eventually the poet leaves New York to return home with the strength of the city.

Nepal in the aftermath of horrific earthquakes is the setting of Quaking Cantos. Just like the black shape fleeing his grandmother prompted the journey inward, it is this tragedy that moves the poet towards the suffering Nepali people. Quaking Cantos is my favorite of the two books because it allows the poet to display the kind of compassionate craftsmanship such a subject demands. The most stunning accomplishment of this book is the poet’s ability to use short lines to convey the physical and emotional devastation in the wake of a natural disaster. Here is an example of this from the poem “Nipple”:

“a baby crawls

on the cold

chest

of earth

looking for

his dead

mother’s

nipple.”

The short lines slow down the tempo of the poem so much that the reader almost feels as if they are crawling with the baby through the rubble. In poems like “Bhaktupar” and “Sunya” the abrupt lines create the very effect of the debris they describe, an accumulation of unexpected objects lying on top of one another and sometimes mixing together. Sharma is gifted at an enjambment that reflects the destruction of the scene, evident in the poem “Course of Courage” which describes “buildings about to tumble/into the grand jaw of Time.”

In his outward journey, the narrator often fixes his gaze on the NGOs that have descended onto his country in the wake of this crisis. Throughout the book, he amusingly calls such organizations “Compassion Inc.” In “Quake Relief” a lamb starves under a sign in which an NGO is seeking blood from donors. The stark imagery of an animal suffering under such an appeal raises legitimate questions about the abilities and methods of these organizations, particularly their blindness to the everyday life of the Nepali people. InQuaking Cantos, Sharma brings this life to the epicenter of his collection, creating “a song/of human lives/crackling.”

In A Blizzard in my Bones the narrator begins picking up the inner wreckage of his life. It is only through this process that he is able to confront the outer wreckage ofQuaking Cantos and raise up the lives of the Nepali people. This is not a perfect journey, there were some sections in both books that could have been truncated and others that could have gone deeper. If you only have the time or budget for one of these books, I recommend Quaking Cantos, though both of them stand on their own. Regardless, Yuyutsu Sharma is an essential voice whose inner and outer struggles are worth chronicling. I am glad to have spent some time traveling with him, and I think you will be as well.

Benjamin Schmitt is the Best Book Award and Pushcart nominated author of two books,Dinner Table Refuge (PunksWritePoemsPress, 2015) andThe global conspiracy to get you in bed (Kelsay Books, 2013). His poetry has appeared in Sakura Review, Hobart, Grist, Wisconsin Review,Two Thirds North and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle where he also reviews books, curates At The Inkwell’s Seattle reading series, and teaches workshops to people of all ages. Learn more athttp://bens25.tumblr.com/

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

In Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s book, ANNAPURNA POEMS, his words are an elegy for his deceased mother, and the forgotten people of the Himalayas. Yuyutsu Sharma travels the globe by plane and foot. However, he appears to always return to the Annapurnas for rejuvenation of his spirit and in his reverence to the mountain terrain and its people. His memory of this region where his heart lives, effects his views on living and informs his writing. The story of the Himalayas is the story of himself. Despite political turmoil due to the seizure and control of the region by Maoists, his personal relationship with the landscape is a history of what he is familiar with.

His mother, who inspired his poetry at an early age is along with him on his mountain trek. In his poem, First Mountains, Mother Mountains, “On the top of the world / I stand facing the gorgeous glacier / with my late / mother’s smiling face.”

Yuyutsu Sharma draws both sensuality and sacredness from the natural world and describes the landscape as a living body, In his poem, My Mataji’s Last Smile, he likens clouds to his mother’s tangled hair, sees his mother’s smile in the innocence of an oriole dead at his feet. In his poem Bridge, “On the rim of a valley’s / bellybutton, a hot springs,”

In his last poem, Silence, he comes down from the mountains into the Valley. In the first stanza, “Near the Annapurna glaciers, I had remained cosy, next to a warm / hearth. Right away, I regret my return to the slums of human / destiny, ashtray of our shattered dreams.”
I know from these lines that this poet’s return to the Annapurnas will be imminent.

Yuyutsu RD Sharma embraces man and nature as the same both earthly and sacred, his imagination shaped by mule paths, a river, the sound of rain. There is no other poet quite like him.

Friday, September 30, 2016

“Nepal is a nation born out of the breath of
poets/ translators.” Yuyutsu RD Sharma

Recipient
of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature
Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of
Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of
Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator.

He has
published nine poetry collections including, Milarepa’s Bones, 33 New Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2012), Nepal Trilogy, Photographs and Poetry on
Annapurna, Everest, Helambu & Langtang (www.Nepal-Trilogy.de,
Epsilonmedia, Karlsruhe, 2010), a 900-page book with German photographer,
Andreas Stimm, Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and
America, (Howling Dog Press, Colorado, 2009), and recently a translation of
Hebrew poet Ronny Someck’s poetry in Nepali in a bilingual collection, Baghdad,
February 1991 & Other Poems. He has translated and edited several
anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and launched a literary
movement, Kathya Kayakalpa (Content Metamorphosis) in Nepali poetry.

He has held a workshop in creative writing and translation at Queen’s
University, Belfast, University of Ottawa and South Asian Institute, Heidelberg
University, Germany, University of California, Davis, Sacramento State
University, California and New York University, New York.

Born in Nakodar, Punjab and educated at Baring Union Christian College, Batala
and later at Rajasthan University, Jaipur, Yuyutsu remained active in the
literary circles of Rajasthan and acted in plays by Shakespeare, Bertolt
Brecht, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee. Later he taught at various campuses of
Punjab University, and Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu.

The Library of Congress has nominated his recent book of Nepali translations
entitled Roaring Recitals; Five Nepali Poets as Best Book of the Year 2001 from
Asia under the Program, A World of Books International Perspectives.

Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian,
Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. He just published his nonfiction, Annapurnas &
Stains of Blood: Life, Travel and Writing a Page of Snow, (Nirala, 2010) and
completed his first novel.

Currently, he edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes
literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times.

Half the year, he travels and reads all over the world to read from his works
and conducts creative writing workshop at various universities in North America
and Europe but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.

More: www.yuyutsu.de
www.niralapublications.com

1) What inspired you to write your first poem? Since then what has beenyour inspiration?

Yuyu: My childhood upbringing in my grandfather’s house inspired me to write. I
was adopted by my grandfather as he had no son, only three daughters. My
grandfather was a learned person and had several books all around me from
my early childhood. Also, the deeply religious atmosphere in my family
influenced me immensely. The oral traditions of Bhakti poets left an indelible
impact on my life.

3) Can Poetry be learned, improved and taught? Is Poetry a skill or talent
reserved for few people?

Yuyu: No, poetry cannot be taught, it has to be there in your blood and bones,
In Asia, we have this great Guru tradition. But a Guru can only evoke the Muse
lurching in the dark corner of the mind of the poet to be…

4) Do you think Poets are Mad?

Yuyu: In a special way, yes. And also as Shelley said ‘unacknowledged
legislators’ of the world.

Nepal always had the scourge of tyrants and ruthless despots ravaging the
innocence of the innocent people. Being on the edge of the world, the democracy
came quite late, in 1990 only. Today in the new democratic set-up, with the
ongoing struggle for a just political system without losing past glory of
age-long traditions, a writer’s role becomes extremely delicate as well as
intriguing.

5) In your lifetime career what obstacles and encouragements you’ve
encountered? Who/What has been your source of motivation to continue writing
poetry?

Yuyu: Kabir says if you want to be a poet, first put your house on fire and
come with me and be a poet. Writing poetry is a very formidable job, so a poet
should be prepared for the worst. Especially in the Indian subcontinent where
buying poetry is not a norm, it’s very frustrating. Poets are elevated to
unimaginable heights but refused any financial support.

My family, especially my late mother, remains a constant source of inspiration
for me to write. I remember when my first book of poems, A Prayer In Daylight
appeared and I went to present first copy of the book to my mother, she took
the book, touched it to her forehead and went to the family shrine to place it
before the god’s image. She was so very proud my vocation as a poet.

6) How’s the scenario of English Poetry in Nepal? Do you see a good future?

Yuyu: We have good poets coming up, the scene is vibrant and diverse.

7) Can Poets writing in English contribute to Nepalese society, culture,
peace et al? What’s the role of an English-writing poet in a country like
Nepal?

Yuyu: Nepal is a nation born out of the breath of poets / translators.

Poets
have always played a vital role in shaping policy in Nepal. I find poets here
in Nepal writing in many languages , including English, serving the Muse very
effectively.

8) Who’s your favorite poet and books that have touched you?

Yuyu: I am a great admirer of Nepali poet Gopal Prasad Rimal. Kabir and several
other Bhakti poets have touched me hugely. Contemporary Indian poet Jayanta
Mahapatra has also remained a significant influence.

9) What’s your message to the future poets of Nepal?

Yuyu: Listen to the sound of your heart and try to weave a song out of it.

10) Lastly, can you name one poem of yours that you would consider the best
of all?

Yuyu: Yes, I have a few favorites. But wherever I go I always begin with my
poem ‘Mules ‘from my book, Annapurna Poems as the poem is central to the lives
of people struggling for a bare survival in the High Himalayas. But I often
conclude my readings with “Space Cake, Amsterdam’ which gives my audiences a
peep into my later work coming from my travels in Europe and North America.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

This review is from: A Blizzard in My Bones New York Poems (Hardcover)

Whenever Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma greets anyone, he says “Namaste” and gives the accompanying bow with hands folded in front of his heart. “Namaste” means “I bow to the god in you” and one might say that to write poetry is, for this writer, an endless act of bowing to the indwelling holiness of everything in the universe.

At his master class at NYU, Yuyu said, to be a poet you must set your house on fire and walk away. I think that this speaks to the urgency of the poetic vocation in his own life. When he was a child, his father, who had had a religious conversion, wanted to give him away to a group of austere monks. The monks knew better and told his father to send him to school.

Because of the wisdom of the monks he was able to become a great poet and a great trekker and wanderer throughout the world. His poems speak to a wonder and curiosity born out of his love of this world and the experiences it offers. You will hear in his work an eclectic set of references – Lorca, the Himalayas, Amsterdam, the fish sold in a market in New York. The world presents to him an amazing array of rich experience and that, filtered through wonder and humility, and immense generosity, yields a poetry of wonder an surprise. You will hear lists and repetitions – echoes of Whitman and Ginsberg yes but also echoes of mountain streams and strange gods, brought together in a voice full and fully his own and full of humor generosity, and wisdom.

In his book, A Blizzard in My Bones, Sharma brings this background and sensibility to the city he claims as a second home. Reviewers have remarked on the mixing of east and west and surely that’s here – even in the language as Hindi or Nepali words are made to rhyme with English ones. The book presents a man, haunted by the loss of his mother, who travels to New York, post 9-11 and post- Sandy, hoping to find the literary landscape of this city – Whitman, Lorca, Leonard Cohen are some of his heroes. And he does – he finds Brooklyn and the White Horse Tavern and the Chelsea Hotel. But he also finds a city defined by commercial brand names and homeless people, a city of people suffering from loneliness and isolation. He carries with him the memory of the sacred relationship with nature that he experienced in the Himalayas and he carries this as he wanders the city that he loves and finds dismaying and in many ways alienating. The universal erotic offers some relief, but that sphere, too, is tinged with the isolation that seems so poignant to someone whose culture operates in a more communal way. Sharma’s gift is to see all this and yet to find the sublime in “the holy and the broken.” (pace, Leonard Cohen.) The poems in A Blizzard in My Bones offer a glimpse of New York City that reveals its fissures and its glories. Those of us who live in the city can be grateful for such illumination.

Sometimes words are clearer than images.In Quaking Cantos, earth shattering words reflect the shattering of a world.Yuytsu's poems are beautiful and terrible, and reach your core.If you want to understand rather than just read or hear about the Nepal earthquake, then this slim volume is a must read.I have read them, a few at a time, and I am still trembling

Yuyutsu Sharma opens his collection in 'Twisted Galaxies' with a depiction of recovering ‘fragments of sleep.’ and this image together with the mention of the frogs and the cicadas seems like a waking up out of the terrible trauma which has ravaged Nepal in the form of the recent earthquakes. We are taken swiftly into the experience of the narrator, through the first person wakening, an image of vulnerability, contrasted with powerful verbs and phrases chosen to describe the destructive processes of the earthquake, such as ‘punctured', ‘fractured’, ‘sullied earth’... ‘debased glaciers’, ‘beguiled stars’ and ‘twisted galaxies’ , details which effectively evoke a palpable tension, and an image of traumatised nature. In general, dynamic verbs are used throughout the text to strong effect, enabling a honing down of embellishment, whilst preserving the vivid emotions at play. The careful selection of specific instead of general event also ensures that the poet creates dramatic tension through the particular instead of the vague.

In the following poem, 'Head Piece', we start to picture the local dwelling places, the focus on materials adding significant detail, redolent of building work and effort largely destroyed. We read about the ‘terracotta and wooden struts, sliced out of a single tree,’ for example, and the ‘timeless wooden pagoda,’ building and fabric suddenly unstable, fragile, uncertain, as we read about the ‘mad dash’ out from the canopy, the narrator identified then with an ant, which reminds me of Gregor waking up as an insect in Kafka’s Metamorphosis; the transformation here is nature at nature's hand, but a similar sense, the way I see it, of loss of control and the strangeness of the spatial sense of body is evoked.

I had not known what to expect when I first heard about Yuyu’s poems about the earthquake, but any doubts about how close this poet felt the trauma of this natural catastrophe is clarified in 'Glint,' a visceral description of a victim’s humility in death. Here we have a vocabulary set hinging on movement, ‘bundled’, ‘wounded’, ‘shackled’ and ‘cuffed’, ‘shuddering’ and ‘derange’, lexical choices personifying the natural onslaught in terms of an aggressor humiliating the victim into a loss of both physical and psychic structure. The reader comprehends here, the full extent to which the events have traversed this poet, leaving a palpable, intense trace, of the sheer shock that lays somewhere beyond, hinted at by words of such force. The language seems chosen for rhythmic, syncopated effect as well as meaning and this surely, is partly how the poem succeeds to catalyse in us an actual physical experience of the earthquake, conveyed here much like an attack.

The collection moves on, and I must leave the works to be discovered by the readers for themselves, but I will highlight a few further themes:Suffering and vulnerability:In 'Nipple' we are faced with an unflinching portrays of human vulnerability in the form of a baby searching, vainly, for it’s mother’s breast, but finds only earth’s ‘cold chest’. This theme continues, with the death of ‘grandma’ on the ‘grassy ground’ which finds the narrator here in standing in tears beneath the sky, and it seems here as if all emotion and sorrow is somehow exposed by the disaster that has torn through the usual protective enclaves of home, custom and form. The poet draws the reader’s attention to both the raw and spontaneous downfall of tears, and the paradoxical, ‘frozen caverns’ of his eyes, the narrator here evidently stunned with loss and grief.

Portrayals of the sheer defencelessness of building and community follow, the prayers of priest, hopeful to the last, no way to deflect the destructive course of nature. Later, the image of ‘smashed brass bells, guilt of possessing tongues that kept millions captive to atrocious citadels’ … continues the theme of the transience of religion and custom in the face of such disaster. The houses like wrestlers flopping and ‘prostrate’ is a further image of the vanquishing of building and home.

The theme of devastation is counter-pointed with the effort shown at recovering routines, by the market traders for example, in 'Reeking Armpits', selling their wares, and in close writing about the courage shown amongst villagers. We feel by that point in the book, that we need that sense of relief and recovery and these poems are well placed, to reflect the delay, patience and fortitude required in the restoration of their lives. The recounted survival of a nine month old baby is a poignant detail the reader will find gives some comfort after the appalling events.

Quaking Cantos - an impassioned response to the earthquakes in his native country and place of residence for half of every year.A genuine, heartfelt response that spares no pain, but tells it as it was, neither pandering to an over sensitive reader by lessening the force, nor overdoing his recount to the point of over indulgence. This is where poetry as document really works, in honing into the specific detail that struck a real chord with the poet. The broad-sweep is for the newscaster, whereas the poignant close focus is for the writer who walks amongst the remains and writes it down in their own, unschooled words; for how can anyone ever be prepared for such an event? And where find literary precedent or source material or guiding inspiration? There may be none, and at times like this it is the way that the heartbeats or the sound of your own footfall that is the key to the language found. The earthquake takes the poet and the reader into an experience beyond the interpretative world of today’s media and into the raw perception of a poet amongst ruins and slow and gradual recovery.

Yuyutsu Sharma ’s Quaking Cantos leaves me in awe. How is the poet able to get so deeply inside this horrific natural disaster and make it become the reader’s personal experience? How is he able to write with tenderness and beauty, as well as with anguish and sadness, painting with his own inimitable brush of words and observations what certainly was tearing at his own heart.?

Sharma writes of the destruction as he describes what he has seen--

“A lamb
Tethered to an electric pole…”

from Quake Relief, a poem in which the word, ‘tug’ is used often. And tug is what it does to this reader’s heart. The simple lamb becomes symbolic, its need for survival after the quake representing all of Nepal.

And in Seven Things that Caused the Quakes, Sharma touches on traditional beliefs and superstitions and takes us to the 21st century’s newest gods:

“the earth changed
side in her sleep…”

“But they did not listen
lost as they were
in their virtual worlds,
iPads, iPhone Facebook, Twitter.
They killed it
and they threw it
in the Sunkosi river…”

“From its insulted eyes
it shot a curse,
bringing the mountains
upside down…”

And from the Epilogue, 3, we return to the animal world,

“a dead horse
being pulled uphill
by a muscular mountain man.”

And in 8, from the Epilogue, this stunning question:

“On whose side
are you, poet?”

These are poems that will put you beside the poet as he surveys the destruction and seeks words to convey his emotions. Read this book and discover how successfully he has done so.

Monday, August 29, 2016

-a brief background and review by Dr. David Austell, Columbia University

The poetic vision of Yuyutsu Ram Dass Sharma of Kathmandu is a dream-space, a crux-point of mysterious intersections and collisions. His intellectual focal point has often been his homeland of Nepal with its profound cultural heritage and sheer natural wonder, and Nepal has been the subject of much of his powerful poetry, for example as exhibited in his majestic Annapurna Poems. It is his fascination with the pathos of culture-collision, whether in recounting an after-party in The Netherlands (Space Cake Amsterdam), or in meeting the illiterate mother of a young Gurkha who has died on a hillside battlefield in Afghanistan, that has been a hallmark of Yuyu’s poetry. It is his “literary tectonics” that most distinguish his work: the brutal shock of human and animal confrontation with the Himalayas, and the sometimes marvelous, sometimes crushing collisions that occur between peoples of differing cultures, ethnicities, castes, and countries. His literary tectonics further describe the horror of earthquake devastation, and the collapsing human depths and burgeoning heights caused by catastrophe. Never far away in Yuyu’s writing are the luminous mysteries and intimidating wildness of nature at earth’s highest altitudes in the Himalayas:

I am utterly alone,stuck on the last mountain of the world,And beyond me just one more mountainwhere they say a deity livesguarding a tiny turquoise lake.And thereafter nothing buta realm of melting snowswhere the souls of the gods live.

-from "Little Paradise Lodge”

There is an exoticism overlaying Yuyu’s work that is especially captivating (and best experienced in his live readings of the poems); from a Westerner’s perspective, it may at first seem as if Hilton’s Lost Horizon had ballooned into a literary framework, and Yuyu’s verses to new revelations of Shangri-La. Don’t be fooled. There is no escapism here, since we’re immediately faced with the versed reality of the often desperate plight of his homeland, the suffering of people and animals, the sounds of Kathmandu, a city balancing on the knife-edge of ecological and political disaster.

The continuation of his poetic vision is A Blizzard in My Bones: New York Poems, Yuyu’s deeply moving new collection, and a remarkable addition to modern urban literature. The context of the poems has moved beyond Anapurna and away from Europe to that perhaps most exotic of all places, New York City. Here every collision and intersection that can be imagined occurs, often at once it seems, and it is only the mind of a poet who has become in many ways an expatriate New Yorker who might make contemporary sense of the ensuing emotional and artistic melee.

It is not any single focal point, however, or even the combination of three focal points, that make this new poetry so powerful; but rather the fact that the verse is as profoundly multicultural in its perspectives and sensibilities as the city itself. In essence, the verse is filtered through the sensibilities of a devout practitioner of Hinduism. It is Nepal and Hinduism and Brooklyn and Manhattan and Greenwich Village drawn together in a new Space Cake: Amsterdam, but centered in the concrete and steel heights of Metropolis. This is New York City in the early 21st century as measured through the psyche of a mystified expatriate priest-intellectual; and it is quite simply wonderful artistry.

Top Customer Reviews

Yuyutsu RD Sharma’s A Blizzard in my Bones: New York Poems
allows us to see New York City with new eyes of wonder
as can only be done by someone who is not a native.
With great compassion, he adopts the city with all
its flaws and the marvel of its history.

Iconic images become the vehicle for
personal metaphor and examination.

He explores how readily we can lose
ourselves in a city

so imprinted with the stories of millions yet retain our
own personal connections to it.

With exquisite poetic sensibility he exhibits how so many personalities
add to the collective persona of the city itself. New
York becomes an archetypal symbol
paradigmatic of, and yet distinct from, other
places on earth.

Sharma’s verse moves us from the personal

to the universal
experience without sacrificing
the distinctive nuances of such a complex
metropolis

or a single person’s contribution within its frequently impersonal
presence.

He refines its ubiquity down to the sensibility of a village,

underlying the great bond of similarities we all share.

Yuyutsu Sharma is a treasure as a person and as a writer.

His poetry invites
trans-cultural participation
and a human connection through its global appeal.

He is an artist who works to promote all artists
who endeavor to create at
their highest potential.

Space Cake Amsterdam & Other Poems from Europe and America

Annapurnas Poems

Annapurnas and Stains of Blood: Life Travels and Writing on a Page of Snow

About Me

Recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator.
He was born at Nakodar, Punjab, and moved to Nepal at an early age. He has published eight poetry collections including, Milarepa’s Bones, Helambu, 2012, Annapurnas and Stains of Blood: Life Travels and Writing on a Page of Snow (Nirala Publications, New Delhi) and Nepal Trilogy, (Epsilonmedia, Germany) with German photographer Andreas Stimm and edited and translated several anthologies of Nepali poetry into English. Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch.
Yuyutsu lives in Kathmandu where he edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing. Half the year, he travels all over the world to read his works but goes trekking in the Himalayas when back home.
More: www.yuyutsu.de